Book review: The Lost Goddess, by Tom Knox

How terrific to find a new thriller in which the dramatic action emerges from an exemplary mix of first-rate research, interesting politics and credible characters! A novel such as this really gives you hope for good reading at the end of a busy workday or during a trip.

The Lost Goddess opens with a young British archaeologist making a fascinating discovery in a cave in France and, with a swiftness approaching warp speed, sends us spinning into contemporary Laos. There on the fabled Plain of Jars, a British photojournalist trying to make a serious career in a declining market comes across another remarkable find.

Both Brits soon discover themselves in the midst of a murderous plot that knits together the ancient world and the modern, and modern France and contemporary South Asia. The plot sends the main characters to places such as provincial Russia and high-altitude Tibet near the Chinese border. It brings together neurological science and left-wing madness, and zigzags from the origins of cave paintings in deepest France to the social and psychological states and straits of South Asia’s most brutal political movement.

Moreover, Knox’s characters seem credible enough for us to worry jars’ worth of sweat over them, and his settings leap to our minds like fine location work on a movie screen, as when our photographer hero travels along rough roads toward northern Tibet’s Baimang Snow Mountains, where the peaks “loomed beyond, absurdly clear in the clear, cold air, a row of somber patriarchs in white churchlike hoods …”

This thriller moves in leaps and bounds but always keeps us feeling what the characters — often dismayed, sometimes brilliant, nearly always worried if not terrified — are feeling, as when in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, our hero suffers the troubling sensation of “the scorpion of fear” scuttling down his collar, “under his shirt, and down his spine …. This city: It always got to him.”

The thrill of discovery, the fear of the pursuit, the amazement of truths revealed, the woes and worries about personal safety, social justice, and the world at large — when we read this novel, all of this gets to us, it does.

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